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Irish and International Art Gallery in Belfast

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Charles Brady

July 31, 2013 by

My Wallet

15x18"

Oil on Canvas

Onion

Envelopes

Charles Brady

1926 - 1997

HRHA

Charles Brady was born in New York in 1926. He took night classes in drawing before entering the Art Students League of New York in 1948 to complete a year long course. After art school he continued to paint, beginning to exhibit in the early 1950s and at the same time working to support himself, mostly in menial hotel jobs, but also for a while as guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Brady had his first solo exhibition in the Urban Gallery in 1955. In 1956 he travelled to Ireland and began painting the Irish countryside. He returned to New York in 1958 but in 1959 he moved back to Ireland and settled there for good, first in Dublin and then Dun Laoghaire.

Poverty forced him to paint on small pieces of cardboard and small pictures became typical. He is widely recognised as, a painter of insignificant, even banal objects, which he treated with monumental grandeur and dignity, combining a spare, almost minimal aesthetic with an open, painterly approach. Everyday objects such as an open matchbox, a bus ticket or an eyedrop box, float in a distorted perspective. These small, modest, compositions allowed him to refine a spare almost mystical style.

Charles Brady’s works are included in numerous public collections including the Irish museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery, Ireland.

Filed Under: Painting Tagged With: HRHA, Irish Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Ireland

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14-16 James Street South, Belfast, Northern Ireland, BT2 7GA
Tel: 028 9031 3013 Email info@jameswray.ie

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